Eloise fan living with ghosts at The Plaza

Ernest Hemingway was said to have once told F. Scott Fitzgerald that he should give his liver to science, but his heart to The Plaza Hotel.

It's at The Plaza where Truman Capote threw his famous Black and White masquerade ball. Where Barbra Streisand and Robert Redford ran into each other in the final scene of "The Way We Were." Where the Beatles hid from crazed fans before their first appearance on the "The Ed Sullivan Show."

The Rockefellers lived at The Plaza. And, more importantly, Eloise, the original scamp of children's literature, was born and raised there.

Now, finally, after years of fantasizing, it's where Patty Farmer lives too.

It's not a cheap fantasy.

Farmer, whose main abode is in San Clemente, won't say what she paid for her pied-a-terre in Gotham's most storied hotel.

But the Plaza website currently lists a 476-square-foot apartment with one whole bathroom for $1.5 million. And Farmer owns a 1,000-square-foot apartment with one whole bedroom, so let your jaw drop.

When she bought it, in 2006, the year The Plaza turned 100-plus hotel rooms into apartments, they told her she could have a view of Central Park or the garden.

The difference, she said, meant spending "an outrageous amount of money, or just an obscene amount of money."

She coughed up outrageous.

It happened while she was visiting New York City one day in 2006. After a concierge at The Ritz mentioned they were selling off Plaza hotel rooms, Farmer ran down Fifth Avenue with her checkbook.

Like thousands of other New Jersey-raised girls of a certain age, Farmer read and reread books about Eloise skibbling and skiddering around The Plaza. On special occasions, she even got to put on her black patent leather Mary Janes and white gloves to be chauffeured by her mother to The Plaza for tea and cucumber sandwiches.

Now she could skibble around the plaza and order raisins and spoons from room service around the clock.

In 2007, Farmer moved into her apartment, gazed dreamily out her window to see horse drawn carriages trotting through Central Park, met her doormen (John and Jimmy) and began exploring.

That's when the ghosts of Plaza past began to beckon.

"I've seen ghosts and not in a corny way," Farmer says. "But ghosts of the past."

From the day it opened in 1907, the hotel, built in the style of a French Renaissance château, has been a playground for presidents, celebrities and real-life princesses.

It's where Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald sipped gin cocktails; Ava Gardner threw her engagement ring out the window during an epic row with Frank Sinatra; and Marilyn Monroe had the original wardrobe malfunction when her dress strap snapped for a clicking mob of photographers.

Farmer skiddered down to the front desk one day to ask if she could dig into the hotel archives for fun, but was told there were no hotel archives to dig into. So she went to The New York Library on 5th Avenue. But there wasn't much there either.

Farmer's forte is investments, but the way she saw it, someone had to write a book. Or 10.

There could be one just on movies made at The Plaza — Cary Grant in Hitchcock's "North by Northwest," Neil Simon's "Barefoot in the Park;" Streisand in "Funny Girl."

But if there is one spot in the hotel that packs more ghosts than chandeliers, it's The Persian Room. Opened in 1934 to celebrate the end of Prohibition, it was a swanky nightclub, decked out, in Farmer's words, in "crimson velvet drapes... plush ruby colored chairs... burgundy dappled carpets," where a slo gin fiz sold for 65 cents.

If you played The Persian Room, Diahann Caroll says, you knew you had made it. It's where Judy Garland and Lucille Ball and Ertha Kitt could be found – in the audience, watching Liberace or Sammy Davis Jr. through a haze of cigarette smoke.

Humphrey Bogart instructs Miss Mccardell to "get reservations at The Persian Room" for him and Audrey Hepburn in the movie "Sabrina."

It's also where Eloise was born.

Author Kay Thompson has passed on. But illustrator Hilary Knight has not. Farmer rang him up and they met at Farmer's apartment on the eighth floor.

He told her how it all began. Kay Thompson showed up late one night for her act as a singer at The Persian Room. In a childlike voice, she told the fidgety crowd: "I am Eloise. I am six."

Laughs ensued. And Thompson kept up the gag.

A friend told Thompson she knew the perfect person to illustrate her alter-ego: Knight. Thompson invited him to the Persian Room one night. After her performance the two of them sat down at a table.

Thompson conjured Eloise, and Knight sketched out a funny little girl with flyaway hair as he listened.

And that's how it went. The two would meet at The Plaza. Thompson would turn into Eloise and say things like "my day is rawther full" or she would pretend to call the valet to pick up her sneakers to be "cleaned and pressed." And Knight would sketch it out.

"Eloise: a book for precocious grown ups," was published in 1957 and became an instant hit. Publisher's Weekly pronounced Eloise "the terror of the Hotel Plaza in New York."

Three more books followed as did legions of Eloise fans. Her portrait hangs in the lobby to this day.

Farmer tracked down other Persian Room alums, as many as she could find who are still alive or at least answering their phones.

She spent hours talking with Andy Williams, Connie Stevens and Diahann Carroll; peeked into Connie Towers' Beverly Hills closet to see her old Persian Room wardrobe; and listened to Carol Lawrence relive the night Cary Grant stood up in the audience, walked to the stage and kissed her.

Farmer flies there once a month, staying for a week or so, with her teacup poodles, Sabrina and Marina.

Once Sabrina fell ill and Farmer had to call a Park Avenue vet. A man arrived with a little black bag and a woman wearing a white nurse's uniform. They arrived at the Plaza asking the doorman to direct them to Miss Sabrina.